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King V. Hostick Scholarship

Established by the late manuscript dealer King V. Hostick, this scholarship provides financial assistance to graduate students in history and library science whose dissertations address some aspect of Illinois history.

Application Criteria & Excellence

  • The applicant must be enrolled in a recognized graduate history or library science degree program in an accredited institution. Applications from other disciplines will be considered at the discretion of the award committee.

  • The subject of the dissertation must be directly related to Illinois history and must be approved by the graduate committee of the institution. Preference may be given to applicants who require use of the collections at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library (formerly the Illinois State Historical Library).

  • The applicant must provide the King V. Hostick Award Committee with: a certified academic transcript of graduate work; a letter of recommendation from the applicant’s dissertation director which also certifies that the applicant has been advanced in candidacy; a current vita; a four-to-six page description of the research topic, including methodology, where it stands in the historiography, a bibliography, and sources to be consulted during the award period; and two additional letters of recommendation from faculty members of the applicant’s committee who are familiar with the applicant’s work.

  • Stipends are individually determined based upon the applicant’s research needs. A detailed budget proposal listing travel, lodging, photocopying, and specific collections to be examined at institutions during travel stay should be submitted. If electronic equipment is requested, it must be itemized.

  • The applicant agrees to deposit a copy of the completed dissertation in the collections of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library (formerly the Illinois State Historical Library). Should the dissertation be published as a book, the applicant agrees to deposit a copy of the published book in the collections of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library (formerly the Illinois State Historical Library).

Submission & Inquiries

All applications must be received by March 31st of every year.

For further information contact:
Illinois State Historical Society

Attn: William Furry
PO Box 1800
Springfield, IL

62705-1800


Telephone: (217) 525-2781
Email: executivedirector@historyIllinois.org

Download application form 

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Previous Scholarship Winners

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2024

Lydia Biggs, Syracuse NY, “Ursulines on the Frontier: Race, Indigeneity, and Gender in French Louisiana, 1685-1802”

2023

Francis Russo, Philadelphia, PA, “A New Historian of Utopian Socialism Based on Robert Owen’s New Moral World”

2023

LeNie Adolphson, Freeport, “Health Care in the Black Metropolis: A History of Provident Hospital”

2023

John William Sarvela, Ponca City, OK, “German-American Soldiers in the American Civil War”

2022

Joshua David Fulton, Northern Illinois University, “Performance Patriotism: the State Council of Defense, the Illinois Women’s Committee, and the Role of the State in World War I Illinois”

2020

Benjamin Nadler, State University of New York Albany, “‘The Idea Spread Like Fire:’ Narrativizing Dissent in the Illinois Mine War, 1932-1936”

2020

Katherina King, Albert-Ludwigs-University, Freiburg, Germany, “African-American Women Writers and the WPA”

2020

Ian Iverson, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, “Moderate Men and Conservative Influences: The Illinois Republican Party and the Politics of Union, 1854-1861”

2010

Lawrence Celani, University of Missouri, Columbia, “They Came Apart at the Seams: The Long History of the Illinois and Missouri Borderland”

2010

Meagan T. Frenzer, University of Florida, Gainesville, “Dancing in the Devil’s Playground: The Intersection of Labor, Morality, and Pleasure in Chicago’s Dance Halls, 1910-1930”

2010

Katherina King, Albert-Ludwigs-University, Freiburg, Germany, “African-American Women Writers and the WPA”

2010

Wayne Duerkes, Iowa State University of Science and Technology, Ames, “Market and Community Development in North Central Illinois, 1833-1852”

2018

Nicholas Kryczka, University of Chicago, “Selective Renewal: Education Markets and Urban Renaissance in Post-Civil Rights Chicago”

2018

William H. Adams, University of Kansas, “Daughters of Ida B. Wells: Black Women’s Activism from 1964-1987”

2018

Ruby Oram, Loyola University Chicago, “Useful for Life: Chicago Girls and the Making of Vocational Education, 1880-1930”

2018

Shannon N. Missick, State University of New York at Albany, “The Evolution of a Desert: A History of Food Access in Chicago, 1950-1999”

2018

John Matthew Corpolongo, University of Oklahoma, “Reform and Refuse: Race, Labor, and the Limitations of Reform in Chicago, 1850-1920”

2018

Wayne N. Duerkes, Iowa State University, “The Rise of Northern Illinois: Community and Market Development within the Antebellum Midwest”

2017

Hope Shannon, Loyola University Chicago, “Mobilizing the Past: Local History and Community Action in Metropolitan Chicago, 1960-1980”

2017

William Cliff, Florida State University, “Creating the Antebellum West: Illinois and the Formation of the Middle Border”

2017

Amy Zanoni, Rutgers University, “Poor Health: Retrenchment and Resistance in Chicago’s Public Hospital”

2017

Jon Marcos Reynolds, Northern Illinois University,  “Systems of Indebtedness: Wage Garnishment and Its Effects on Minority Communities in Chicago, 1850-1969”

2016

Elizabeth Jean Stigler, University of Kansas, “Community Through the Kitchen: Tradition, Memory, and Citizenship in Chicago’s Czech American Community”

2016

Brady Winslow, Texas Christian University, “The Rise and Fall of Mormon Nauvoo, 1839-1846”

2016

Jon Marcos Reynolds, Northern Illinois University, “Systems of Indebtedness: Wage Garnishment and its Effects on Minority Communities in Chicago, 1950-1969”

2016

Joseph Otto, University of Oklahoma, “Plumbing the Prairies: Water Management in the Agricultural Midwest”

2016

Morgan Shahan, Johns Hopkins University, “Managing Deviancy: Parole, Probation, and Carceral Development, 1895-1939”

2016

David Tiedemann, University of London, “Britain and the United States at the World’s Fairs, 1851-1893”

2015

Rachel Boyle, Loyola University Chicago, “She Shot Him Dead: Criminal Women and the Struggle over Social Order in Chicago, 1870–1920”

2015

Christopher Ramsey, Loyola University Chicago, “Forgetting How to Hate: The Evolution of White Ethnic Responses to Racial Integration in Chicago, 1945–1987”

2015

Nora Krinitsky, University of Michigan, “The Politics of Crime Control: Race, Policing, and State Power in Modern America”

2015

Gerald Adam Rogers, Lehigh University, “Political Structure of Illinois Indians, 1700-1832”

2015

Sophie Elizabeth Cooper, University of Edinburgh, “Identify and Nationalism in the Irish Diaspora: Chicago and Melbourne, 1850-1890”

2015

Matthew Margis, Iowa State University, “Mobilization of the National Guard along the Mexican American Board, 1916-1917”

2015

Megan Klein, Loyala University Chicago, “The Irony of Integration: Race, Politics, and Spatial Disintegration of a Constructed Community”

2015

Kasey Henricks, Loyola University Chicago, “State Looteries: Historical Continuities, Rearticulations of Racism, and American Taxation”

2014

Christopher A. Schnell, St. Louis University, “The Lawyers’ Frontier: The Professionalization of the Bar and the Middle Class Family in Abraham Lincoln’s Midwest”

2013

Nicholas J. McCormick, University of Chicago, “The Changing Representation of Ecology, Evolution, and Science in Chicago’s Natural History Museums, 1890-1940”

2012

Long Bao Bui, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “‘I Feel Impelled to Write’: Social Networking and the Culture of letter Writing During the Civil War”

2012

Rabia S. Belt, University of Michigan, “Disabling Democracy in America: Disability, Citizenship, Suffrage, and the Law, 1830-1920”

2012

Christine A. Croxall, University of Delaware, “Holy Waters: Lived Religion, Identity, and Loyalty along the Mississippi River, 1780-1830”

2012

Katie Sutrina, Northern Illinois University, “The Food Pyramid: Mexicans, Agribusiness, Governments, and Communities in the Midwest Migrant Stream”

2012

Sally Heinzel, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Emancipation and Reconstruction in a Free State: The Racial Politics of Illinois, 1840-1890”

2012

Courtney Wiersema, University of Notre Dame, “All Consuming Nature: Human Ecology, Consumer Goods, and the Making of Industrial Chicago, 1833-1893”

2012

Jesse Nasta, Northwestern University, “In a State of Slavery, In a State of Freedom: African-American Migration and Legal Status on the Northwestern Frontier, 1803-1860”

2011

Jeremy Prichard, University of Kansas, “In Lincoln’s Shadow: Springfield during the Civil War”

2011

Sarah Bischoff, Rice University, “Lincoln’s South: Perception and Response”

2011

Karen Joy Johnson, University of Illinois at Chicago, “Christ in the Negro: Catholic Interracialism in Chicago, 1930-1968”

2011

D. Clinton Williams, Harvard University, “Righteous Politics in the Black Metropolis: Religion and Urban Space in Postwar Chicago”

2011

M. Scott Heerman, University of Maryland, “The Nations of this Continent: Slavery and Making the American Republic in the Mississippi Valley, 1730-1840”

2011

Steven Barleen, Northern Illinois University, “‘The Working Man Does not Need to Be Told How to Live’: The War on the Saloon and the Shaping of Working-Class Identities, 1870-1920”

2010

Thomas Dorrance, University of Illinois at Chicago, “Old Friends and New Deals: Reconfiguring Local Politics in 1930s Chicago and Los Angeles”

2010

Melissa Hayes, Northern Illinois University, “Litigating Intimacy: The Legal Culture of Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Illinois”

2010

Ryan W. Keating, Fordham University, “‘Give Us War in Our Time’: America’s Irish Communities in the Civil War Era”

2010

Patrick A. Pospisek, Purdue University, “Galena, Illinois: The Rise and Fall of Frontier Urbanization in the American Midwest, 1820-1870”

2010

Barton Price, Florida State University, “Evangelical Periodicals and the Making of America’s Heartland in the Nineteenth Century”

2010

Alonzo M. Ward, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Before the Flood: African Americans and the Labor Movement in Illinois, 1865-1915”

2009

Shannon Smith Bennett, Indiana University, “A Different Civil War: Rioting in the Lower Midwest, 1860-1890”

2009

Mimi Cowan, Boston College, “Immigrants, Nativists, and the Making of Gilded Age Chicago”

2009

Daniel Peart, University College London, “Popular Engagement with Politics in the United States During the Early 1820s”

2009

Kerry L. Pimblott, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Soul Power: Black Power and African-American Christianity in Cairo, Illinois, 1967-1974”

2009

Felicity M. Turner, Duke University, “Narrating Infanticide: Constructing the Modern Gendered State in Nineteenth-Century America”

2008

Stephen A. Martin, University of Oklahoma, “Native Diaspora: Shawnee and Delaware Communities in the Mississippi Valley, 1779-1825”

2008

Matthew T. Popovich, University of Illinois at Chicago, “Boundaries of Progress: The Politics of Urban Annexation and the Anti-Annexation, 1870-1930”

2007

Megan Birk, Purdue University, “At the Mercy of the State: Rural Child Welfare Institutes, 1865-1910”

2007

Marc Dluger, Loyola University Chicago, “A Regimental Community: The Men of the 82nd Illinois Infantry Regiment Before, During, and After the American Civil War”

2007

Keith Erekson, Indiana University, “When People Do History: Indiana’s ‘Lincoln Inquiry’ and the Practice of History in America”

2007

Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “The Rise of a Punishing Logic: The Punitive Turn in American Social Policy, 1968-1980”

2007

Jason Kozlowski, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Will Globalization Play in Peoria? Class, Race and Nation in the Global Economy, 1948-1998”

2007

Michael Rosenow, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Injuries to All: The Rituals of Dying and the Politics of Death among Workers, 1877-1924”

2007

Matthew Sherman, Saint Louis University, “Presidential Assassinations: The Failure to Protect Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley”

2007

David Spatz, University of Chicago, “Expressways and the Transformation of Metropolitan Chicago, 1939-1973”

2006

Thomas Bahde, University of Chicago, “Race and Justice in the Heartland: Three Nineteenth-Century Lives”

2006

Will Cooley, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Holding the Line: Status, Race and the Middle Class on Chicago’s Southside, 1945-1983”

2006

Bryan Nicholson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “The Price of Americanism: Youth, U.S. Nationalism, and the American Legion, 1935-1970”

2006

John Reda, University of Illinois at Chicago, “Joining the Union: Land, Race, and Sovereignty in the Illinois Country, 1763-1824”

2006

Joshua Salzmann, University of Illinois at Chicago, “Safe Harbor: Chicago’s Waterfront and the Political Economy of the Built Environment, 1877-1920”

2005

Rene Luis Alvarez, University of Pennsylvania, “Minority Education in the Urban Midwest: Mexican Immigrants and Mexican Americans in Chicago, 1920-1990”

2005

John A. Ayabe, Saint Louis University, “Evangelicals and the Antimission Crisis: A Study of Religious Identity in the Central Mississippi Valley, 1820-1840”

2005

Denise R. Johnson, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, “GI Jane Remembered: Central Illinois Women Who Served Their Country During World War II”

2005

Stacy Pratt McDermott, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “A Legal Conduit of Community Power: Grand and Petit Jury Service in Antebellum Midwest”

2005

Sarah Rose, University of Illinois at Chicago, “No Right to Be Idle: Work, Citizenship, and the Invention of Disability, 1880-1930”

2005

Anne Stephenson, University of Chicago, “Rebuilding Bungalows: Home Improvement and the Historic Chicago Bungalow Initiative”

2004

Kenya Davis-Hayes, Purdue University, “Lessons of Place: A Case Study on the Creation of Physical and Curricular Segregation, 1910-1920”

2004

Cheryl Hudson, Vanderbilt University, “Making the Modern Citizen: Political Culture in Chicago, 1890-1930”

2004

Dana Weiner, Northwestern University, “Racial Radicals, Principles Enacted: The Struggle Against Inequality, Prejudice, and Slavery, 1829-1870”

2003

Jennifer Harbour, University of Iowa, “Shining in the Shadow of Men and War: African-American Women’s “Philanthropy and Political Culture in Civil War Chicago and St. Louis, 1863-1870”

2003

Michael D. Innis-Jimenez, University of Iowa, “Persisting in the Shadow of Steel: Community Formation and Survival in Mexican South Chicago, 1919-1939”

2003

Christopher E. Jaffe, Northern Illinois University, “‘Us and Them’: The Changing Boundaries of Acceptance and Exclusion for Incoming Ethnic Religious, and Racial Groups in Rockford, Illinois, 1880-1945”

2003

Robert M. Morrissey, Yale University, “Bottomlands, Borderlands: Empire and Identity in the Eighteenth Century Illinois Country”

2003

Emily B. Zuckerman, Rutgers University at New Brunswick, “EEOC v. Sears”

2002

Sarah Boyle, State University of New York at Binghamton, “‘Creating a Union of the Union’: The Place of Regionalism in the Development of the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, 1880-1900”

2002

Steve Burnett, Carnegie Mellon University, “‘Cheat You Fair’: Maxwell Street and Chicago’s Working Poor, 1912-1968”

2002

Linda Carlisle, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, “Elizabeth Packard and Boundaries of Gender, Religion and Sanity in Nineteenth Century America”

2002

Cheryl Ganz, University of Illinois at Chicago “A Century of Progress: The 1933 Chicago World’s Fair”

2002

Steve Hageman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “‘This is a Terrible Thing’: Race, Class, and Gender on Chicago’s Southwest Side, 1950-1970”

2002

Michael T.M. McCoyer, Northwestern University, “Mestizaje Meets the Color Line: Mexicans and Racial Formation in the Chicago-Calumet Region, 1917-1960”

2002

Caroline Rolland-Diamond, Universite De Paris 1 (The Sorbonne), “Student Activism in Chicago in the Vietnam War Era, 1965-1973”

2002

Michael Sherfy, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Narrating Black Hawk: Constructing and Reconstructing a Native American Historical Subject, 1832-2002”

2001

Pamela L. Baker, University of Illinois at Chicago, “The National Road and the Promise of Improvement, 1802-1841”

2001

Susan Roth Breitzer, University of Iowa, “Class, Ethnicity, and Community: The Jewish Labor Movement of Chicago, 1886-1928”

2001

Lionel Kimble, Jr., University of Iowa, “Combating the City of Neighborhoods: Employment, Housing, and Civil Rights in Chicago, 1940-1955”

2001

Matthew R. Lindaman, University of Kansas, “Heimat in the Heartland: A Trans-Atlantic German Migration”

2001

Russell McClintock, Clark University, “Response to Secession: Northern Political Culture and the Crisis of the Union, 1860-1861”

2001

Paula J. Anders McNally, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, “Moral Education in One-Room Schools: Macoupin County as a Case Study, 1906-1940”

2001

Robert M. Owens, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Mr. Jefferson’s Hammer: William Henry Harrison, the Hoosiers, and the Primacy of Indian Policy in the Early Republic”

2001

Jennifer L. Weber, Princeton University, “The Civil War and Northern Society”

2000

Rachael Bohlmann, University of Iowa, “Drunken Husbands, Drunken State: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union’s Remaking of American Families and Public Communities in Chicago, 1874-1933”

2000

Jeffrey A. Brune, University of Washington, “Agrarian Vestiges: Rural Migrants and the Rise of Chicago, 1871-1929”

2000

Jonathan S. Coit, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “The Discourse of Racial Violence: Race, Gender, Politics and Crime in Chicago, 1914-1923”

2000

Sean Harris, University of Illinois at Chicago, “From Moral Healing to Mental Hygiene: The Commitment, Institutionalization, and Aftercare of the Mentally Ill in Illinois from 1870-1930”

2000

Daniel J. Lerner, Michigan State University, “Visions of a Sporting City: ‘Shadowball’ and Black Chicago, 1890-1955”

2000

Alan G. Shackford, Indiana University, “The American Bottom, Crossroads of Early America”

2000

Peter J. Ufland, University of Illinois at Chicago, “The Politics of Race in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, 1864-1890”

1999

Mark A. Cyr, Washington University, “‘The Valley of Shadows’: Religion, Law and Politics in Antebellum Illinois”

1999

Andrew J. Diamond, University of Michigan, “Hoodlums, Rebels, and Vice Lords: Youth Gangs and the Politics of Race in Chicago, 1919-1973”

1999

Elizabeth Green, Northern Illinois University, “Unraveling a Pastime: Needlework and Needlework Literature, 1870-1910”

1999

Elisa Miller, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Education for What? Home Economics, Woman, and American Higher Education, 1890-1935”

1999

Timothy B. Neary, Loyola University Chicago, “Crossing Parochial Boundaries: African-Americans and Interracial Catholic Social Action in Chicago, 1919-1954”

1999

Oleta Prinsloo, University of Missouri-Columbia, “The Case of ‘the Dyed-in-the-Wool Abolitionists’ in Marion County, Missouri in the early 1840s: An Examination of a Slaveholding Community’s Response to Radical Abolitionism”

1999

Nicole Ranganath, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Wedding Women to Tradition: Marriage in the South Asian Diaspora 1965-1990”

1998

Brian S. Deason, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, “Eye of the Storm: A Political Biography of Senate Majority Leader Scott W. Lucas”

1998

Dawn Rae Flood, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Hard to Prove: Victims in Chicago Rape Trials, 1926-1966”

1998

D. Bradford Hunt, University of California at Berkeley, “What Went Wrong with Public Housing? Federal Policymaking and Local Implementation in Chicago, 1934-1980”

1998

Michael D. Jacobs, Marquette University, “Catholic Response to the Ku Klux Klan Incursion into the Midwest, 1921-1928”

1998

Charles Lumpkins, Pennsylvania State University, “The History of African Americans in East St. Louis, Illinois circa 1914-1945”

1998

John F. Lyons, University of Illinois at Chicago, “The Chicago Teachers Union and the Schools, 1937-1980”

1998

Lisa Gail Materson, University of California at Los Angeles, “African American Women’s Involvement in Electoral Politics, 1913-1936”

1998

Chandra M. Miller, Harvard University, “Motivations and Attitudes of Union and Confederate Soldiers in the Civil War”

1998

Stephen J. Provasnik, University of Chicago, “The Quest for Perfection: The Making of the School and the State, 1870-1920”

1998

Mark R. Wilson, University of Chicago, “The Business of Civil War and the Transformation of Political Economy: The Midwest and the Union, 1848-1877”

1997

Michael J. Bennett, St. Louis University, “Bluecoats Afloat: The Common Union Soldier of the American Civil War”

1997

Wallace Best, Northwestern University, “‘Passionately Human, No Less Divine’: Racial Ideology and Religious Culture in the Black Churches of Chicago, 1915-1955”

1997

Tracey A. Deutsch, University of Wisconsin at Madison, “The Politics of Mass Consumption: Gender, Retailing, and the State, 1920-1946”

1997

Rosemary Holz, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “The Birth Control Clinic: Women, Planned Parenthood, and the Birth Control Manufacturing Industry, Illinois, 1930-1975”

1997

Lynnea Magnuson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “A Gendered Reading of Manifest Destiny”

1997

Doris Malkmus, University of Iowa, “Coeducation, Social Reconfiguration and the Settlement of Illinois”

1997

Wendy Plotkin, University of Illinois at Chicago, “Deeds of Mistrust: Race, Housing, and Restrictive Covenants in Chicago, 1900-1950”

1997

Mark Santow, University of Pennsylvania, “Saul Alinsky and the Crisis on American Democracy”

1997

Andrew B. Smith, University of California at Los Angeles, “Reels of Blood and Thunder: A History of the Chicago Western”

1997

Randi Jill Storch, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Shades of Red: The Communist Party and Chicago’s Workers, 1928-1939”

1996

Bryon Andreasen, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “‘As Good A Right to Pray’: Protestant Democrats on the Northern Civil War Home Front”

1996

Mara Dodge, University of Illinois at Chicago, “The Social Construction of Female Criminality: A History of Women’s Imprisonment in Illinois, 1860-1970”

1996

Suzanne Cooper Guasco, The College of William and Mary, “‘On the Alter of His Principles’: Edward Coles and the Crucible of Slavery”

1996

Caroline Waldron Merithew, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Prairie Immigrants: Class Formation, Racial Consciousness, and American Identity in the Illinois River Valley Coal Towns, 1894-1924”

1996

Rowena Olegario, Harvard University, “Credit and Society in Nineteenth-Century America

1996

Graham Peck, Northwestern University, “The Social and Cultural Origins of Sectional Politics: Illinois from Statehood to Civil War”

1996

Andrew C. Rieser, University of Wisconsin at Madison, “Origins of the Liberal Creed: Public Culture and Private Desire at Chautauqua, 1874-1919”

1996

Amada I. Seligman, Northwestern University, “Scaling Ghetto Walls: Race and Community on Chicago’s West Side, 1940-1970”

The Illinois State Historical Society and the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency invite applications for the annual King V. Hostick Research Scholarship on Illinois history. Preference may be given to research conducted at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library (formerly the Illinois State Historical Library), but projects using collections in other Illinois libraries and repositories of historic documents and materials are also welcome. Stipends are individually determined up to $5,000.

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